Over the next month, Mar misses four days of school. Even though he still comes over, we’ve been spending way more time watching TV than talking, and he won’t tell me what’s up with the absences. He’s out again today but shows up to Players practice.
“Angel started with me,” I say. “He fucks with me whenever you’re out.”
“What you want me to say?” he says. “You wanna tattle on him again? Do it.”
“I’m just saying I wish you’d been in school,” I say.
“You act like you’re the only one who got shit going on,” he says.
I start to respond, but Mar widens his eyes for me to shut up. Meghan’s rolling up to us.
“So…?” she asks with a big, expectant smile.
I stare back.
“You guys get your letters yet?”
“From Latin?” I say.
“My cousin got her acceptance yesterday,” she says.
“I didn’t get a letter,” I say.
“Huh,” she says.
“I got mine,” says Mar.
“And?”
“I made it,” he says.
Meghan squeaks and throws her arms around him, and instead of doing an air-pat Mar holds on for real.
“How come you didn’t tell me?” I say.
“I was trying to tell you,” says Mar.
“I’m sure you’ll get in, too,” Meghan says to me. “But still, knock on wood.”
When I get home, I scour my house for the letter. I call Ma and Pops at work and they say they haven’t seen anything. Then I call Kev. Not only did he get into Latin, he got a perfect score on the test. I call Jimmy next. He got his letter, but it was the wrong kind of letter.
THE NEXT DAY, Mar shows up late to homeroom, looking like he got no sleep. Kaleem holds his letter up and says, “Booyah! You make it or what?”
“Yup,” Mar says.
“Congrats, homey,” says Kev.
The laid-back way Mar keeps delivering the news makes it even harder to take. Both of us wanted this so bad, and now that he’s gotten it he’s acting like it’s no thing.
“WHAT DID MARLON get on the test?” Jimmy whispers to me while Mar’s waiting in the lunch line.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Ask him. Bet you I got a higher score.”
“How do you know?”
He looks around and whispers furiously, “Marlon, Kaleem, they only got in because of the quotas.”
“Nah,” I say. “Mar’s mad smart.”
“So ask him what his score was! I guarantee it’s the fucking quotas.”
“Well, even if it is—”
“I know. America fucked black people. You know who else America fucked? The motherfucking Vietnamese. And we get jack fucking shit.”
I know it’s the force speaking through Jimmy. Then again, maybe he’s onto something. We feel mad guilt about all the shit we did to black people, Native Americans, too, but we don’t give a doggie bag about what we did to Vietnam. And all those Vietnamese heads whose lives we ruined and who had to jet from their homes to America? We just let them fade off in their own grimy grottoes and forget about them.
MY LETTER ARRIVES that afternoon. I tanked the reading section.
I’m on the wait list.
When Ma gets home, she finds me in bed stabbing into a cuticle—a stubborn bit that I can’t pry out with my teeth—with a thumbtack.
“What are you doing to yourself?” she says.
I keep at it, and she grabs the tack out of my hand.
“Jesus, Dave. You’re bleeding,” she says. “There’s probably germs all over this thing.”
“Good,” I say.
I show her the letter and she tries to console me with some ramen, but I tell her to take it away. Then Pops gets home and tries to get all huggy. I can’t even look at his cheap ass. I barricade myself inside the tent and refuse to come out. He’s the reason I’m still at the King. If it was just Ma’s decision, she’d have come up with the loot for private school a long time ago. He’s the one who always says no—to new sneaks, to new cars, to anything other than homegrown grub. Dude never, ever bends.
“Why don’t you come out so we can talk about it?” he says.
“Why don’t you take me out of the King?” I say.
“Let’s just see what happens with the wait list, okay?”
“Or you could put me in Benno’s school now.”
“Dave,” he says. “You know Benno’s a special case.”
“Well, I’m sick of being the unspecial case!”
I know what he’s gonna say—Of course you’re special, too, but we believe in public schools—so I wrap a pillow around my ears and wait till he walks away. Eventually the lights start going out and I decide to stay the night in the tent. I shoot into a sock and I’m still feeling tense, so I start right in on a doubleheader. Even after round two, I’m nowhere near relaxed. I’m lying in the soiled tent, surrounded by Benno’s beady-eyed animals, when the obvious occurs to me. Tactics aren’t the answer—they’re the problem. I got what was coming to me. I’m lucky G-dash even put me on the wait list.
I decide the next morning: no more tactics, ever again. I figure it’ll help my chances even more if I do some Good Samaritan shit, so over the weekend I go to the Arbs and spend an hour scraping cig butts out of cracks in the pavement. When I get home, I hear Benno crying in our room and instead of saying something like “Shut it, sapien,” I make him an egg sandwich and slip it under the door. That stuff feels good and is actually pretty easy, but the tactics ban is a next-level struggle. I’m back to sleepless nights and they’re lonelier than ever, especially since Benno’s made a permanent camp in the hallway outside my parents’ bedroom. As soft as this sounds, I miss having his chubby ass around. I like hearing him shift in bed, fluff his pillow, sigh and groan in frustration. It calms me.
Pam and Meghan creep into my thoughts constantly, little taunters whispering, Just this once. I try to crowd them out, thinking about Carmen and her cursive, but I’m not even sure she’s pure anymore. So I’ve been thinking about my little brother—the one on the way—to get my mind clean. He’s started squirming in Ma’s belly, and whenever he moves Ma calls me over and lets me touch him. I like to press my face against the bump and feel him flapping around in there, like a fish in a bag. His hand poked out today—at least, that’s what it felt like, a fist—and I pressed my fist to his. I can’t wait to chill with him, but I also wish he didn’t have to leave that dark, snug sack. Better to just stay there, ignorant and satisfied, unaware of pyrite and knives, fiending for no shorties, no Machines, no Latins, utterly untouched by the force.
I’VE HELD OFF for a week now, and each day it gets a little less agonizing. But then Meghan rocks this outfit at Players practice—one of those stretchy leotard-looking tops. It’s white, which means straight-up bra strap visibility. And this isn’t some dull beige granny bra, either. This shit is red. Halfway through practice, a bit of lace pokes out. Just a shred of red, but I can see the best part of the bra now, the centerpiece, the motherfucking clasp. I bite the inside of my cheek so hard it bleeds.
That night, I’m up late with a raging Lincoln Log and I know that freedom from agony is just two tugs away. But I take a deep breath, clutch my Jesus piece, and run my thumb over the nails on his tiny palms. Eventually, I go cotton and slip off into sleep. And that’s when I have my first wet dream.
I’d love to tell you that the dream went like this: I unclasp Meghan’s bra, watch the red lace fall away in slo-mo, spin her around, still in slo-mo, and dive into second base. But it doesn’t go down like that. It doesn’t go down that way at all.
Instead I’m sitting at my desk in Ms. Ansley’s room alone, no Meghan, Carmen, or Pam in sight. The bell rings and I walk to my locker. There’s a flyer taped up on it:
BAKE SALE
CAFETERIA
TODAY
I roll to the caf. No one’s around and the tables are covered with uncut sheets of Rice Krispies Treats, pyramids of brownies and pies, rows of cupcakes the size of softballs. A friendly old black woman appears and says, “Where you been, Dave? What took you so long?”
“Just got out of class,” I say. “Came as soon as I saw the sign.”
“Don’t you realize?” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you. This bake sale—it’s for you.”
“For me?”
“Just for you.”
“How much for a Krispies sheet?”
“Why, Dave, nobody told you? It’s free. All of it.”
“All of it?”
“Every last bite. Better hurry, though. The sale ends in a minute.”
For some annoying dream-reason, I don’t have my backpack with me, so I’m stuffing my pockets and using my T-shirt as a net, gathering in as many snacks as I can. The old lady is smiling and saying, “Go right on, son. As much as you please.” And the goods look so delectable and I’m starving—probably because, as usual, I barely ate any of the swiss lunch Pops packed me—but I can’t waste valuable seconds, so I don’t stop, even for one nibble. The woman says, “Time’s almost up,” and I’m flying down the tables, arms extended like tollbooth barriers, knocking as many sweets as I can into my shirt-net, and she says it again, “Time’s almost up,” and all of a sudden my legs freeze and I can’t move anymore, and before I get the chance to sink my teeth into a single sweet morsel I’m awake, exploding.
It’s four A.M. I’m too ashamed to fall back asleep. I lie there, in the mess of my nutmare, pondering and loathing who I am. The only light in the room is coming from the Day-Glo galaxy on my ceiling. I got those stars at the science museum gift shop, stuck them up there years ago with Pops, before all this madness began. Pops sweats stars and I used to love them, too, especially the Big Dipper, because it looked like a basketball hoop to me. I used to be inspired by the Dipper, dream about dunking on it. Now it just depresses me. I’m stuck down here, always will be, fiending for unreachable rims.
I OVERSLEEP AND Pops barges into my room.
“You’re gonna be late,” he says. “Up and at ’em.”
I spring up, shirtless, and Pops eyes the Jesus piece on my chain. I’ve been rocking it inside my shirt around him to avoid a beef.
“Where’d you get that?” he says.
“Marlon gave it to me.”
“You’ve been wearing that to school?”
“So?”
“It’s not a fashion statement, Dave. You might offend an actual Christian.”
“Who says I’m not Christian?”
“If you want to keep it around the house, that’s fine, but I don’t want you wearing it in public.”
“Mar said as long as you believe in Jesus, you’re Christian.”
“How many times are we gonna go over this? You’re Jewish.”
“Did Ma convert?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Did she?”
“No. Why would she?”
“This girl in the Players told me half Jews on the dad side don’t count.”
“That’s absurd.”
“She said if I want to have a Bar Mitzvah, I’ll have to convert.”
“You are going to have a Bar Mitzvah—a secular one.”
“Well, what if I want to have a real one?”
“What does that mean? You want to have an Orthodox Bar Mitzvah? I suppose you’ll have to convert. You’ll have to get circumcised, too.”
“What? I’m already—”
“That’s right. Just like you’re already a Jew. But some idiot rabbi, probably the same one who taught your friend who is and isn’t a real Jew, is going to tell you yours isn’t a real circumcision, and that if you want to be a real Jew you’re gonna need a do-over.”
“You mean he’s gonna take a knife—”
“More like scissors.”
The last thing I want is less of a dick.
“Forget it,” I say. “I’m just sick of being nothing.”
“You are something. Anyone who says you don’t count is a moron. You certainly would’ve been Jewish enough for Hitler. The Nazis weren’t checking with the rabbis to see who had a real circumcision.”
MAR’S NOT ON the bus again today. He shows up halfway through second period and he’s got crust in both eyes. At lunch, he takes yesterday’s Boston Herald out of his bag, flips it over, and reads the sports section.
“You’re not getting lunch?” I say.
“Not hungry,” he says, buried in the Herald.
“You know you can get, like, pre–kicked out of Latin if you have too many absences and late days?” I say.
Mar scowls and turns back to his paper. Jimmy shoots Mar a bitter stare and chews his taco with his mouth open. I slurp my yogurt silently, waiting for the bell, when I hear a loud crash at the other end of the caf. Two kids race by our table. Someone shouts, “Fight!” and now everyone’s out of their seats.
Jimmy gets up and says, “Fight!”
“You coming?” I ask Mar.
“What you wanna look for?” he says.
He sits there with his paper and I run with Jimmy and everyone else to get a better view. The crowd around the beef is too thick, so me and Jimmy stand on the bench of a nearby lunch table. Two eighth graders are headlocking each other. One of them is rocking a yellow hoodie and the other’s in a black White Sox tee. The dude in the yellow wriggles his arm out, grabs on to the Sox guy’s high-top, and yanks it, hard. The Sox guy screams and the dude in the hoodie lets go of his hair and starts punching him in the face. He gets at least five direct blows in before Rawlins rips him away. One of the teachers on lunch duty, a tiny Haitian lady named Ms. Noel, rushes over to the kid in the Sox shirt, who’s lying all fetal, cupping his bleeding face. Rawlins twists the kid in the hoodie’s arm and everyone watches and oohs as he marches him out of the caf.
All of a sudden, the Sox kid is back on his feet with something shiny in his hand and rushing toward the dude who beat his ass. Rawlins and the kid in the hoodie don’t even realize he’s behind them, and the Sox kid plunges his blade right into the other dude’s back. Instead of running away, the stabber drops his knife and just stands there, trembling and crying, screaming, “What? What?” Rawlins slams him into the floor and pins him down with his knee.
Ms. Noel screams, “We need an ambulance!” and the dude in the hoodie staggers to a bench and tries to pat his wound, but he can’t reach it. Ms. Noel holds his hand and the kid sits there, eyes shut, breathing fast but not crying as a brown splotch expands across his yellow hoodie, like rot spreading on a banana. The bell rings, but nobody moves.
“Everybody get to class! I want you to walk out of here quietly!” booms Dr. Jackson from the entrance of the caf. My heart’s machine-gunning and I’m starting to get shook that I’m having some kind of panic attack.
“Mr. Greenfeld,” Dr. Jackson says. “Move it!”
I tag up with Mar in the hallway.
“That was fucked up,” I say, voice squeaking on the up. “I feel sick.”
“That’s what you get for looking,” he says, speed-walking now.
“You think he’s gonna, like, die?” I say.
“Just shut up about it,” he says. “Stop thinking about it.”
“You ever know anyone who died?”
“You serious right now?”
My fam’s tiny. Ma’s cut off from her peeps, except for her gay little brother, and pretty much all of Pops’s relatives got smoked in Germany. I don’t even have any cousins. I’ve never been to a funeral.
“I mean, you ever known someone who got killed?” I say. “Like, actually murdered or whatever?”
“Yeah,” he says, looking at me like I’m corked. “More than one. Like three different dudes.”
“Jesus,” I say. “That’s fucked up.”
“That’s normal,” he says.
We walk into class and Ms. Ansley asks us to put our heads on our desks and take a long moment of silence. I hear the sirens crying in the distance. We just saw a piece of steel break through a sweatshirt, a T-shirt, a body. Normal is a cold, an elbow cut, a bad dream that eventually ends. What the fuck is normal about this?
A couple minutes later, over the loudspeakers, Dr. Jackson calls the whole school into the auditorium.
He limps onto the stage with his cane and says, “It goes without saying that stabbing someone in the back is a cowardly act. But what I want to say, loud and clear, is that every act of violence—back, front, or sideways—is a cowardly act. Any of you with a knife, or God forbid a gun, in your pocket or locker is nothing but a coward. My hope is that nobody’s even entertaining the thought of payback. Because if you are, I don’t want you coming back in here tomorrow, through these doors, past the name etched above them. This is the Martin Luther King Middle School. You want to do the brave thing? If you’re angry or hurt or scared, come talk to me or your teachers. That’s what we’re here for. Now, let’s all bow our heads. We’ve got a student at Beth Israel right now, and he needs our prayers.”
THERE’S A FOX25 news truck waiting outside after school. A reporter sticks his mic out as we’re boarding the bus, asking if anyone knew the kid who got stabbed. Mar puts his hand in the lens and boards, but I stop, stare into the camera, and say, “I didn’t know him personally, but I saw it happen….”
“You have a minute to talk?” the reporter asks.
“Green,” Mar says through the window. “Don’t even—”
“I guess I could do something real quick,” I say.
For all I know, I could die tomorrow. I could get stabbed by Angel. I’m not trying to pass up my last chance at prime time.
“Great,” the reporter says. “Stand over here?”
The cameraman positions me so he can get the MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., MIDDLE SCHOOL sign in the background. Before I can even think of a good sound bite, the reporter says, “So, it must have been pretty scary, seeing that?”
Dude’s trying to get me to go soft on TV. No chance.
“I mean, not really,” I mumble into the mic.
“I’m surprised to hear you say that,” says the reporter.
“This kind of thing happens sometimes,” I say, palming my curls down as casually as I can.
“So you’ve seen other incidents—”
“Not, like, stabbings,” I say. “But I’ve had a knife held up to me.”
“Well, that sounds pretty scary,” he says.
I’m not about to let this dude lure me into his bitch trap.
“It’s normal,” I say.
“Normal?”
Mar gets off the bus and waves me in.
“You know,” I say. “For a ghetto school.”
The reporter tries to pump me for more, but our driver honks and I bounce onto the bus with Mar.
“Probably shouldn’t have done that,” I say to Mar.
“Ghetto, huh?” he says.
I CALL MA as soon as I get to the crib and tell her about the stabbing. She leaves work early and comes home to be with me. Pops does, too. They’re trying to get me to talk about my feelings; they even ask if I want to go to Benno’s shrink. The truth is, the stabbing hasn’t fully sunk in—and right now what’s really stressing me is that interview. I said ghetto—out loud—on FOX25. In my house, calling a school ghetto, especially on FOX25, could get you disowned. Still, I decide to tell my parents in advance that I’m gonna be on TV. Then we’ll watch together and I can explain, blame my blabbing on the trauma. I’d rather them find out from me than from one of their hippie-ass friends.
The news comes on at six. I’m in the tent with Benno, channeling anti-jinx vibes, praying that the ghetto part will be edited out of the broadcast. About ten minutes in, there I am, nibbling my nails, blatantly doing my hair, looking like a Guinness-level sapien. I bury my head under the pillow to block it all out. When I come up for air, the TV is off and Ma is crying.
“Jesus,” says Pops.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It just came out. I didn’t mean to say that word—but it’s kinda true, okay? You sent me to a school where kids get stabbed—”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Pops says. He looks horrified, but not at me.
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“You had a knife pulled on you?” he says. “When did this happen?”
A thousand fucks erupt inside of me. I was so shook about ghetto, I blanked on the way worse move. I got tricked into snitching on the six o’clock news.
“It was a while ago,” I say. “It wasn’t a big—”
“Dr. Jackson needs to know about this,” he says.
“It was a tiny knife!”
Pops heads for the cordless.
“Are you trying to get me killed?” I say.
“We’re trying to keep you safe!” he screams.
“Then take me out of the fucking King already!” I scream back.
“Dave—” Ma starts.
“Hang up! I’ll save you the trouble and just kill myself,” I say, plunging under the pillow. Pops pulls it off me and I cover my face with my hands.
“What did you just say?” he says.
“You heard me! I said I want to fucking kill myself.”
I’m expecting Pops to get big, flail, and roar like a grizzly. Instead he shrinks.
All trembly, he whimpers, “Don’t ever say that again.”
He’s staring at me, inches from my face. Benno’s cupping his ears and crying now. Pops grabs my wrist and says, “Don’t even joke about that.”
The phone rings. Pops picks up, clears his throat, says hello, and then, “Hi, Dr. Jackson. Yes. We saw.”
DR. JACKSON ASSURES me he’ll keep my tip confidential. The next day, during first period, Rawlins clips Angel’s locker and finds the knife. Dr. Jackson calls me into the office to let me know that Angel’s been sent to the Barron Center. I’m expecting SNITCH carvings in my desk, an avalanche of fists at lunch, but no one says or does anything. No shit talk about the FOX25 interview, either. A few heads stop me in the halls, say they saw me on TV, and one girl even says, seemingly serious, “You did good on the news.”
I guess everyone’s too focused on Curtis Monroe, the dude who got stabbed. It turns out he’s got a punctured lung. He lost mad blood, kids are saying, and he’s still in the hospital, on a breathing machine.
A COUPLE WEEKS later, during last period right before April break, Dr. Jackson makes an announcement over the loudspeakers: “This hasn’t been an easy time for the King. But I’ve got some good news to share. It’ll take a little while, but Curtis is on his way to a full recovery. No matter what anyone says about the King, I believe more than ever that the dreamers united can never be defeated. Now, enjoy your time off, and let’s all say it one more time, together.”
We all say it, loud—“The dreamers united can never be defeated!”—and Dr. Jackson rings the bell, releasing us into break. The only person who doesn’t seem amped is Mar. I ask him what he’s doing with his week off. He shrugs and asks if I’ll be around.
“Nah,” I say. “Gotta go on this stupid trip with my pops.”
Kev’s mom is taking him and his sister on a Caribbean cruise. Pops is taking me to the grand opening of the Holocaust Museum. At least we’re staying at a hotel, which means unlimited continental and free cable.
“Aight,” Mar says. I’m sort of relieved that he seems upset.
ON OUR FIRST day in D.C., we ride around in the Whale and Handycam the White House, the huge, sad Lincoln, and the Vietnam Memorial, which makes Pops all blinky. The next day we wake up early and roll to the Holocaust Museum. There’s a line around the block and a bunch of people are waiting in wheelchairs.
“This is a big deal,” says Pops. “When I was your age, people didn’t talk about the Holocaust. We didn’t even have a word for it.”
“It’s all Cramps talks about,” I say.
“He only started recently,” says Pops. “For years it was ‘I don’t want to get into it.’ Same with my mother.”
It takes a couple hours to get inside and my feet are already killing me. There’s way too much to read and I’m doing my best to speed Pops along. The first thing I actually stop for is this exhibit about the ghetto. I didn’t know any of this, but it turns out that, back in the day, there were Jews in Venice, who were making solid loot, and the Christians got jealous and forced them into the most hood part of the city, aka the Ghetto. I didn’t know there were Jews from gangster countries like Italy. I always assumed they all came from cold potato-and-borscht spots like Poland and Germany. I definitely didn’t know they invented the ghetto. I’m starting to feel proud of my Jew side for the first time—and I feel even prouder when I get to the part about the Warsaw Ghetto, about all these Jews who stepped to the Nazis.
“This is where Cramps’s family got deported to,” Pops says, pointing to the Krakow Ghetto on the map.
“You sure it wasn’t the Warsaw one?” I ask.
“Positive,” he says.
“What about your mom’s side?” I ask. I don’t say “Grandma,” because she died before I was born. Pops never talks about her, but I remember him saying her fam was from Germany, too. I’m hoping I’ve got some steppers in my blood.
“I don’t think so,” Pops says.
We walk through the rest of the museum and it’s one long blur of swastikas and bones. The thing that stands out for me is the mountain of shoes. You’d think kicks might stop smelling after fifty years, but they don’t. And the funk makes it feel like everything just went down, like all these Jews just got their shoes jacked, and I wonder if any of the funk is Greenfeld funk. I think about the photos in my living room—all those Greenfelds sitting there, trying to look fly for the camera, in their suits and ties and dresses and hats—and I wonder what they were wearing when the Nazis made them strip. Did they get new prisoner gear or did they stand around naked and ashamed for the last seconds of their lives? Thinking about this hits me harder than the pictures of the body piles.
AT THE HOTEL that night, I can’t sleep. I watch ESPN on mute and think about Mar. I wonder what he’s doing right now, why we keep drifting, whether we’ll still be boys in a year. If I don’t make it off the wait list, will he just move on to Latin and forget about my ass?
Eventually Pops wakes up, turns off the TV, and says, “Why don’t you read something?” So I stay up half the night with this comic book called Maus that he bought me at the museum shop. It’s about this kid, Artie, who grew up exactly like Pops did, in the fifties, in Queens, with Holocaust survivor parents. The dad mouse is just like Cramps, too: cranky and cheap as hell, especially about food. At one point, he freaks out on Art for shaking too much salt out of the shaker. He even tries to return a half-eaten box of cereal to the grocery store. Cramps has pulled that stunt, too.
The next morning, Pops wakes me up mad early and we’re back on I-95 as the dawn starts creeping.
“I feel like the guy who wrote Maus must’ve met Cramps,” I say.
“A lot of survivors are like that,” Pops says.
“You mean cheap?” I say.
“I wouldn’t say cheap. They just sort of can’t accept it’s over. You get to the part about Art’s mother yet?”
“You mean, when he finds out she killed herself?”
He nods and then, like it’s no thing, says, “Your grandmother took her life, too.”
He glances over at me and then turns back to the road. He’s waiting for me to respond, and I don’t know what to say other than “I didn’t know that.” Technically I didn’t. But I feel weirdly unsurprised. I guess I’ve somehow always known that she didn’t just die in an accident. What does surprise me is how calm he seems. No tears, no pulling over to the side of the road, nothing.
“A lot of people who escaped took their own lives,” he says. “They felt guilty they got out.”
The way he’s talking, so matter-of-fact, reminds me of how Mar said he knew three dudes who’ve been murdered—like it’s normal for a mom to kill herself. I ask how she did it and he tells me, still totally calm, that she turned her car on in the garage and sucked in the poison air.
“Sorry about saying I wanted to kill myself,” I say after a long silence. “I was just kidding. You know that, right?”
“I know,” he says.
“I feel guilty.”
He touches my knee and says, “You didn’t know,” which makes me feel even more guilty.
We flip the radio on and I doze off for a while. Pops taps me awake as we pass the Camden exit. We’ve driven past here a bunch of times, on the way to Philly, where Pops’s best friend from college lives. We have this tradition of waving when we pass, because before Pops’s family moved to Queens, they lived on a farm near there. Pops took us there once, but now the land is filled with satellite dishes.
“What did you grow there?” I ask.
“I never told you?” he says. He has told me, but I always zoned out whenever he talked about that farm. “We raised chickens, for the eggs. I used to help my mom sandpaper blemishes off the shells. The customers didn’t want them if they had any brown spots on them. They had to be perfectly white.”
“That’s kind of racist,” I joke.
Pops laughs. “That’s a good point.”
A couple seconds later he says, “My mother let me keep one of the eggs in my own little incubator. I still remember watching the chick peck its way out. It was pretty cool.”
Hearing this reminds me of something I did when I was little that I’ve never told anyone about. I’d forgotten about it for years, but watching Ma’s belly grow and feeling my new brother kick around in there, it came back to me. And the longer I wait for my little brother—not to mention a letter from Latin—the more that shit haunts me. I decide to just get it off my chest and tell Pops.
When I was in second grade, our teacher, Ms. Ross, brought a caterpillar in, and everyone wiled out when it turned into a cocoon and eventually burst out and spread its slimy butterfly wings. So then Ms. Ross brought in an incubator and an egg. Everyone was amped for it to hatch, especially me. After a couple weeks, the egg started shaking a little, then cracking. Ms. Ross said it was only a matter of time till we’d get to meet the chick. During recess, I told the teacher I had to go inside to pee, and instead of going to the bathroom I snuck into our classroom. By that point, there were cracks all over the egg, and one crack was so big, you could even see a little bit of feather sticking out. I couldn’t wait any longer. I reached into the cage and slowly peeled open the egg. But the chick didn’t raise its head or kick its legs. It just stayed curled up. I went back out to recess and when we got back, this girl Tameka screamed, “Ms. Ross—it’s dead!” and started crying. I waited until I got home to cry because I didn’t want anyone to suspect me.
“I still feel bad about that,” I say.
“You were a kid,” Pops says. “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”
A few seconds pass and I say, “You shouldn’t, either.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno. You don’t, like, ever treat yourself. You’re not as bad as Cramps, but you never wanna eat out or get takeout—”
“What do I need to take out for? I like growing my own food. I like cooking.”
“Fine, but you never buy new gear. You keep driving this old-ass car.”
“That stuff’s not important to me,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s fun.”
He doesn’t respond. He just smiles like I said something funny. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, and there’s a million extra things I want to ask him about his mom and the Holocaust and the real reasons he never spends money on himself, but I don’t. Eventually he turns the stereo back on and pumps Woody Guthrie, and for a second I remember I’m still mad at him—for sending me to the King instead of ponying up for private school, for all the Nintendo-free years, for every swiss lunch he ever packed me. But the longer he hums, the harder it is to stay mad. My poor pops. Your mom sucked in poison air. How the hell do you even hum after that?
WHEN WE GET back to Boston, Pops turns off at the wrong exit and parks the Whale.
“What’s going on?” I say.
“Follow me. We gotta hurry.”
We jog down Lansdowne Street toward Fenway.
We get to the ticket window and Pops asks for two in the bleachers. Bleachers tickets cost five dollars each and are behind center field. They’re the absolute nosebleeds—not just because you need binoculars to see the ball but because all the rowdy drunk dicks, the kind who will punch you in the face for knocking into their beer, sit out there. Still, this is the first time Pops has ever taken me to a Sox game, so I don’t complain. We hike up hundreds of stairs till we get to our row, which is underneath the huge overhanging scoreboard. Our seats are in the middle, so everyone has to stand up with their beers and dogs as we butt-rub our way past them. Pops is wearing his usual Birkenstocks with socks and one guy says, “Go back ta Woodstawk,” as we edge by.
A vendor comes around slinging Fenway Franks. Without me even having to ask him for one, Pops raises his index finger and says, “One dog. Extra mustard.” He passes the bills down the aisle and tells the vendor to keep the change. I don’t even like mustard that much, but I smear on both packets for Pops’s sake and the dog is still delicious.
“You’re not getting one for yourself?” I ask.
“Nah,” he says, “I’m good.”
He pulls a baggie of trail mix out of one of the twenty pockets in his safari vest.
The Sox start losing big in the fourth inning and can’t recover. By the time the ninth rolls around, about half of the crowd is gone and I’m ready to bounce, too. But Pops is like Mar, I guess, when it comes to staying for the whole game.
“Let’s start the Wave,” Pops says.
“No way. It’s not the right time for it.”
“Come on,” he says. “The Sox need a little juice.”
“I’m leaving if you do it.”
Pops stands up, shouts, “One—two—three—wave!” and flaps his arms above his head.
A guy behind us laughs.
“One—two—three—waaave!” Pops says louder.
“One—two—three—gay!” the shithead behind us shouts.
“Dad, please,” I say.
“Who gives a crap?” he says. “This is always how things get started.”
“Nothing’s getting started. You’re the only one standing up.”
“That’s how it works. You get over the embarrassment, and then the next guy stops being embarrassed, and then it happens. It takes a second, but it always happens. Watch. One—two—three—waaaave!”
And then a couple kids a few rows down stand with their mom. And then the geezer next to us gets up, too. And then, like magic, the whole bleachers are standing and raising their arms, and I watch as the fans in right field ripple up like dominoes in reverse, and then it surges across home plate, and around left field, past the Green Monster, all the way back to us, and this time I halfheartedly stand, too. All of a sudden ten, maybe fifteen thousand people are passing the squeeze—all because of Pops.
I look up at him and he’s got this Is this awesome or what? gleam in his eyes as the human tide continues to roll around us. Each time the Wave starts up again, he erupts in squeaky, astonished “Ha!”s. After a half-dozen rounds, people fade back into their chairs and Pops turns to me and holds up his hand for a high five. The planet seems to stop for a second. I feel the faces of fifteen thousand fans lasered into me like shame-seeking missiles. I picture the whole city of Boston, peering out of skyscraper windows, ogling us from planes and hot-air balloons, scaling trees and streetlights to get a better view, all watching, waiting, to see if I’ll meet my father’s hand.
He’s standing there, with the whitest, most open-jawed smile anyone’s ever seen. It’s the exact kind of dimpled-out glee I’ve tried to iron off of my own face for most of my public life. And I’m kind of amazed, actually, not just at the lack of shame but at how someone whose life has been so swiss—whose actual mom offed herself—is even capable of that softness. I raise my head and glance up at him, my father, bespectacled, Birkenstocked, but kind—someone who took me to a Sox game even though he hates sports, someone who copped me a dog and asked for extra mustard—and I feel like telling him that even though I’m still pissed about the King, if he ever committed suicide I would, too.
I high-five him and no one notices. Nobody—other than Pops—cares.